The Baseball Boys: What’s the Magic Stat to Watch in these Playoffs?

Here to preview it are WEEKLY STANDARD resident baseball lovers Lee Smith and Chris Deaton, who both trace some of their expertise to college. (Lee actually played, Chris watched—and did his senior econometrics project on “The Determinants of Earned Run Average,” which earned him an A.)

Chris Deaton: All right, Lee—since this is baseball we’re writing about, I found as many statistics as I could to support an arbitrary hypothesis. Mine, in this case, is that these playoff match-ups are Historically Awesome. A few numbers to munch on:

• This is the first postseason since 2004 to feature multiple 100-win teams;
• It’s the first since 2003 to have three 100-win teams—the Dodgers, Indians, and Astros—and only the fifth time that’s happened, ever;
• And if we’re going off runs-plated versus runs-allowed, it ought to be the first playoffs evah to include four(!) of this class of contender: The Yankees, who are the American League’s wild card bunch, would be expected to have 102 wins and 60 losses based on them outscoring their opponents 858-660 in 2017. (As it is, New York has a deceptively modest record of 91-71.)

The other four contenders? Just the defending champions “hitting” their stride at the right time of year (the Cubs), a division winner with a 300-strikeout ace to start and the only pitcher in history to strike out 50 percent of opponents as a closer (the Red Sox), a team with three of the National League’s five ERA leaders (the Washington Fightin’ Bryce Harpers), and the NL wild card Diamondbacks, who happened go 11-8 this season against their first-round opponent, the Dodgers.

I mean . . . how good is this bunch?

Lee Smith: I heard the ESPN crew Tuesday night going on how it’s all about strikeouts and bullpens and home runs, and I agree, sort of. The Yankees beat the Twins in part because the Minnesota club struck out more than New York did, 13 times to 5, which means the Twins didn’t put the ball in play for 4 1/3 innings.

But going into the ALDS against the Indians, the Yankees are going to have trouble. Led by rookie sensation Aaron Judge (who led the league by striking out a whopping 208 times), the Yankees finished the season striking out 8.53 times a game, ranked 19th. It’s not clear to me how Judge’s 52 home runs and his .422 on base percentage—incredible for a guy who Ks more than 1 out of every 3 at bats—project in the playoffs. Those power numbers are spread out over an entire season, when most of your games are against non-playoff teams, and you’re facing the front and back end of mediocre rotations, as well as often underperforming bullpens.

In October baseball, you’re facing the best pitching in the game. The Indians have superior starters throughout the rotation, and one of the best relievers in the MLB, Andrew Miller. These games are tight—you want to force the other club to make tough plays and you want to get into the opposing team’s bullpen as soon, and as often, as you can. In a sense, these are wars of attrition. We saw what happened in last year’s World Series when Miller was overtaxed and Joe Maddon was almost on the hook for misusing Aroldis Chapman. In that regard, power is somewhat neutralized come October.

That said, the Yankees have an awesome bullpen and proved it Tuesday night over 8 and 2/3 innings, after a 3-run Brian Dozier homer sent starter Luis Severino to the showers after getting only one out.

CD: That’s what makes the Yankees so interesting to me. Those 13 strikeouts on Tuesday you mentioned? All from their bullpen. In the regular season, New York had five relievers who averaged 12 strikeouts per 9 innings: Four of them pitched Tuesday night and essentially won the game for the home team. But like you said, a bullpen can’t get away with that sort of use in a long series. If the Yankees are going to have a shot against Cleveland, their starters need to give them five or six decent innings a game.

I’m not sure they can. The Indians offense, like everything else they have, is really, really good.

LS: It’s interesting—it’s why Ks are still an important part of the game, as is batting average, which I will make the case is way underrated. It’s not just that a big part of a .360 on-base percentage is the .300 average, but it also represents the walks you get with pitchers going at you carefully because you hit .300. Neither of which are applicable if you swing at bad pitches and strike out a lot.

I’ll make that case in a longer piece in the next few days about the problem with this new obsession with launch angles and exit velocities.

CD: I just googled “why batting average matters” and got the headlines “Here’s why you should beware the hollow batting average statistic” and “Please stop using batting average.” Lee Smith: making batting average the vinyl of baseball stats!

Intuitively, average and OBP serve different purposes. I remember Dusty Baker’s infamous “clogging up the bases” comment about walks, which he said were overrated. But his more telling remark was always, “You ain’t going to walk across the plate. You’re going to hit across the plate.” If you have a lineup of nine guys who get on base 35 percent of the time but only take bases on balls and slap singles, you’re not going to have a potent offense. You need guys on base to score; you generally need players with some pop to score in bunches. That’s why slash lines—average / on base percentage / slugging percentage—and the sum of them, OPS, is useful for contextualizing it all, before you get into advanced statistics to break it down further.

Which brings us to . . . the Houston Astros! Team average: .282, highest in the majors. Team OPS: .823, also tops in the MLB, and 44th all-time. These guys do it all. They hit, hit for power, and they struck out less than any team in either league this year. Maybe a sneaky World Series pick?

LS: The Indians are right behind them in Ks . . .

CD: I keep trying to find something Cleveland doesn’t do well. Maybe the list really does begin and end with flying drones.

The Dodgers haven’t really had any weaknesses this year, either. Except they inexplicably just started losing over the last half of the season. A ton. And they somehow managed to wind up with baseball’s best record anyway. You’ve been out to Chavez Ravine a few times this year—what have you seen about that team that makes them still look potent in October?

LS: I was out at Chavez Ravine in March to see a World Baseball Classic semifinal (Puerto Rico vs. the Netherlands), a great curtain-raiser for a pretty terrific regular season. It featured lots of the guys we’ll be seeing this month, including Carlos Correa (Astros), Francisco Lindor (Indians), Javier Baez (Cubs), Xander Bogaerts (Red Sox), and Kenley Jansen (Dodgers).

I saw the Dodgers when they came to Washington in September, and they’d just stopped their 11-game losing streak with two wins over the Giants. They took two of three from the Nats, and Kershaw didn’t start. Because Cody Bellinger is a rookie, and Corey Seager is in his second full season, it’s not one of these teams that looks like it’s loaded—but it is. I say power is often neutralized in October, but I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that Yasiel Puig has a monster month. He behaved well all year—I think he deserves some Reggie Time.

CD: Ahem:

LS: I say you want to use a solid two-strike approach in October; make the other team make plays when the whole world is watching, and stay away from Ks. And then the NL wild card proved me wrong, sort of. The D-Backs struck out 11 times—but of course everything is off the table when Archie Bradley (a pitcher) triples, one of four D-Backs three-baggers. But see, Bradley gave up two homers in the 8th, which still wasn’t enough. It will be fun to see Paul Goldschmidt in the NLDS. Everyone wants to see a Dodgers-Cubs matchup—but not so fast, because the Dodgers are 2-7 against Arizona in the second half of the season.

CD: I don’t know if the historical record bears this out, but I get the same sense a lot of baseball watchers do that head-to-head records in the regular season don’t really matter come playoff time. I recall a few years ago that the Nationals were 5-2 against the Giants on the year, and then the Giants beat the Nats in four games in the NLDS. One, baseball is random; two, playoff baseball allows managers to do funky things with their lineups and make aggressive decisions with relative impunity. (Thus why Madison Bumgarner led San Francisco to a World Series that year pitching in situations you would never find him in during the 162-game season.)

With the Diamondbacks and Dodgers, I sense something different. Arizona’s overlooked #2 starter, Robbie Ray, dominated L.A. in 2017, striking out the Dodgers 53 times in just 31.2 innings.

Imagine Red Sox closer Craig Kimbrel was a starter and maintained his ludicrous strikeout rate, and that’s what Ray did to his division rival this year.

Ray was used in Wednesday night’s wild card victory over the Rockies, meaning he might not start game one—but he’ll still probably get two starts if the series goes the distance. Which means the Diamondbacks are getting three starts from ace Zack Greinke and Ray combined and they still have their powerhouse batting order.

On the other side, the Dodgers have Clayton Kershaw, the game’s best pitcher, but one who has struggled in the playoffs (partly out of bad luck when it comes to batted-ball data). And we still have a decent sample size—those 19 games—to show that the Diamondbacks can hang with the Dodgers.

There’s no question Los Angeles is the favorite—they ought to be a bigger one to win the NL than Cleveland is to win the AL—but this series is going to be entertaining.

LS: I just want to say one more thing about the NL wild card game—we haven’t seen so many ginger beards in one place, both the Rockies and the D-Backs, since the Wildlings went south of the Wall with Jon Snow. Baseball fashion is hardly unimportant—remember all those Boston teams from the 80s and 90s, and that trademark Sox mustache, like learning how to groom it was a part of spring training in Winter Haven?

Well, it’s when the Sox stopped fielding teams with guys who looked like they walked off a Starsky and Hutch set that they won the World Series. And someone has to point out that we’re in the middle of the Golden Age of baseball socks. Yes, we still have the pajamas look (which started with Clemson University in the 80s, I believe) but we’ve also gone back to the classic high-sock-to-the-knee look, with some of the traditional socks rocking stripes or geometric designs. I wonder if kids today know how good they have it.

CD: I’ve long been on Team High Sock. There’s not a day that goes by I don’t worry Jayson Werth will trip over his pants. (This is not a metaphor for what I think about the Nationals in the postseason.)